


How to Cage a Bird

by softsylvie



Category: Villainous (Cartoon)
Genre: Black Hat is a huge douche but what else is new, Plane Crashes, i do apparently, long walks on the beach except not really, who likes being mean to flug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-24 01:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12001653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softsylvie/pseuds/softsylvie
Summary: The beginning of Flug's evil career doesn't quite flourish the way he expected, the day he gets the privilege of meeting every villain's idol.But hey, everyone loves a surprise!





	How to Cage a Bird

Looking back, it was all kind of ironic. Steeped in near romantic symbols, he supposed, the kind you heard in a ballad or read in poetry, not that he’d ever kept a beat on that sort of thing. It had been called The Angel, and it had been a sleekly configured model that comfortably seated eight, equipped with brand spanking new Hartzell propellers, a two thousand pound load capacity, capable of reaching about 175 knots at only seventy-five percent of its power. He’d been excited to fly her; no longer having to trade between performance and power had been one hell of a deal. She was compact, but she was a beautiful little plane, a hearty one. Before he’d bought her, she had pulled through for the relief efforts of Hurricane David when it hammered coastlines and small townships in the southeast. 

_But hurricane winds and engine failure are two different things, Flug. They’re two very different things. One hurts a hell of a lot more than the other._

The Angel had caught fire, about twenty yards back.

Flug wasn’t thinking about The Angel’s capacity, or its beautiful white and blue nose crushed like a broken finger in the outcropping behind him. He wasn’t thinking about the crates, nor was he thinking about Hat Island.

No, there was a sweltering ridge of blistered flesh swooping over his face. There was the disfigured whistle of his breath through a broken nose. He’d spat out one of his front teeth, or maybe it was something else, he only knew it came out in a knot of blood and pulp and the pain was pounding and horrific and his legs refused to budge at first. He’d screamed. He’d screamed until he’d choked on the taste of pennies boiling near the back of his throat. There was an orange glow, then blackness, then the glow again as if he were watching the faint pulse of the universe.

For all he knew that was exactly what he’d been staring into, hanging limply against the X-straps of his seatbelt. 

Communications shot, of course.

Flug had dragged himself out, dragged himself for what felt like miles, having to stop for breath that he couldn’t scream with at the risk of puking. It was strange, surreal that he couldn’t remember much of the moments preceding the pain, but he supposed he was in the right to think only of moving at this point. He swung out an arm, and with the resolve of a rock climber mounting a plateau without clips or ropes, he’d pulled and pulled. 

On occasion, a warm breeze swept in and kissed the white hot ridge of his face. It woke him but good, any time that faint pulse seemed to be fogging his brain again.

Eventually, there came a time of rest and reprieve, flipping himself onto his back on the sand. He could hear the sigh and chuckle of waves rolling in. His vision had considerably dimmed into the glow of a candle in his left eye, but old righty worked just fine and he could see it was getting dark. The swoop of sky he could make out was black, violet, the color of old bruises.

_I’m gonna die out here, aren’t I?_

The thought seemed so inconsequential, knowing the likely truth of the matter. After all, who would care enough to save a mad scientist? A mad scientist scouting out locations to get started on his diabolical works, no less! Heck, he wondered if he would have found a nice, sinister volcano to build around if he’d gone just a little farther up the archipelago. 

_Yeah, a bit…overdone, but you can’t beat tried and true! Not to mention the benefits of harnessed geothermal energy saving costs on the electric bills! You see? Ominous, **and** practical!_

Sure. 

Because supervillains totally paid electric bills. The thought only occurred to him right there, as he lied on the beach and watched The Angel become a crackling wreathe of smoke twisting towards the stars. He wouldn’t think about dying. No, he’d have plenty of time to think about that when infection came, when sepsis crept in through the gaping front door in his face and did its thing.

_The ocean… saline. Would the salt water sterilize the…_

No, his returning logic would tell him later down the line, seawater was not a sterilized solution so no, no it would not. It would hurt like a bitch though, if that was what you were going for.

He didn’t have much of the strength he needed to pull himself down to the waves anyway. For a time, he watched the white foamy ringlets wind serpentine patterns along the sand. To both sides, the coast seemed to stretch endlessly, godlessly. Turning his head sent skewers twisting through his neck, and so he was content to end his world with darkening oceans and let that be that. 

_Who was I kidding?_

The voice in his head was derisive, sneering. He normally knew better than to argue with it. He hated hearing back from it after so long, but it was better than the pulse because it meant he was alive, and so he welcomed it with reluctant arms.

_You? A villain? And you were going to do what, exactly?_

_Show them,_ he reasoned silently. He spoke from a place of volcanic lairs, of huge black leather chairs he could spin around dramatically in, of ray blasters holstered on his gun belt and a pair of self-righteous heroes hanging upside down over a lava pit. Heck, maybe he would have gotten a white cat while he was at it. 

A bit derivative, but cats were nice. Flug liked birds better, but even he doubted a cockatiel would command much respect.

_Yeah? Well you sure showed them! Way to go!_

Behind the quarreling voices of Doctor Flug Slys, The Angel burned.

_It wasn’t my fault! The engine, something with the engine, god it hurts, I can’t think, it hurts, I can’t remember, why can’t I…!!_

To his far left, the ocean dipped into the blackness of night. At first he figured that to be it for his left eye, pressure on his optic nerve giving to blindness at last, but then the night quivered, it bobbed with grace to the rhythm of calm strides. 

Very knowing strides, very assured. Not something Flug would expect of a person on their way to help after seeing the wreckage; no, those people usually ran, sprinted onto the scene to skid in beside the victim and tap their shoulders, shout questions, hyperventilate until the world went hazy and their knees jittered into water. Or at least, that’s probably how _he_ would have reacted, being honest with himself here.

_So then… oh god, what now?_

“That was almost _sad._ ” The voice vaulting towards him from the coming night was as coarse as the sand beneath his fingers. “No proper shielding, no retaliation shots, and to top it all off, you didn’t even make that big an explosion!” The owner of said voice sounded genuinely affronted by that. 

Flug slowly looked up into the gleaming moon of a monocle. It stood out well against a dark gray face, overcast in shadow by the brim of a black…

_Oh god!!_

He would have jolted straight up if he’d had the strength, and if he wasn’t sure he’d be killed if he moved too quickly. Flug had heard plenty of stories that dripped from the upper rings of super villainy. None of them ended with ‘he’s really a nice guy when you get to know him’.

The demon staring down at him smiled with satisfaction, the edge of his mouth reaching for that one visible eye as it glittered with mischief. “Always good to know the name’s still getting out,” one notorious Black Hat said cheerfully. “So, I’ll throw you… a D minus. Would’ve been a D if you’d at least screamed a little.”

Flug tried to part his cracked lips, but they might as well have run together, melted by the flame. All that rattled out of him was a wheeze. 

Black Hat rolled his eyes. “Stop that, now you’re just milking it.”

“Y-you…!” He swallowed hard against the wet clay clump of panic rising in his throat. “W-were… did you…?!”

“For bloody’s sake, yes, yes, I might have played a bit with your little toy over there,” Black Hat cut in irately, motioning toward the flaming wreckage with vague disinterest. “It was called The Angel, you imbecile, what did you _think_ was going to happen?”

Flug lied there and contemplated this. As he did, his voice retreated, scurried down his worn throat while he silently begged, and pleaded, and prayed that this would not be the last thing he ever saw. For a startling moment as he lied there and beheld the stewing offense on the demon’s face, he was caught blaming _himself_ for the ordeal he was in. The plane _had_ been called the Angel, after all, he’d never bothered changing the name after he’d bought it. Maybe he had been going for a bit of irony, maybe he was a little more poetic than he’d given himself credit for. He _had_ been flying it over Hat Island, of all places, where evil made no secret of its residence and in fact invited heroes to try their hand against _**his.**_

What _had_ he thought was going to happen…?

_Not this!_ An indignant voice screamed. Indignant or not, he knew better than to speak his mind.

“Well? I’m still waiting,” Black Hat pressed coolly, sounding like every angry father in history who had ever stood by a broken window with a baseball in his hand. “Nothing? Nothing at all? All right, then. Thirty seconds.”

Flug’s heart stopped. He did not know what thirty seconds meant, but he knew right then that he wasn’t ready to die yet and it didn’t take long for him to assume these two things were connected. “W-what…?” he asked anyway, stupid as it was.

“Twenty-eight seconds, now,” Black Hat replied impatiently, inspecting the tips of his gloved fingers. “ _Evil_ seconds, mind, which are a little faster than regular seconds. Why you ought to live. Let’s go, chop, chop.”

He gibbered, and the blistered ridge across his face seared along its curve as his eyes widened. “W-what?! To live?! To… to _live,_ live?!”

“Twenty-four, twenty-three…”

“You crashed my plane _and_ you’re gonna kill me?!” His panic spiked in his disbelief. “That’s…! That’s just…!”

“Evil?” Black Hat stopped his countdown to eye the young man flatly. “Really. I wouldn’t have guessed. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…”

His mind tangled, whirling off into the thud of his own heartbeat and the sudden life singing in his veins, Flug scrambled for coherence. He remembered an exercise a school counselor had taught him once, called ‘And Then What?’, something of a mental game to help him stifle what was called ‘catastrophic thinking’. If something were to go wrong, he would ask himself, ‘and then what?’, then elaborate onto the next event. He would pose the question to himself over and over, and gradually, it helped him realize that not every little thing gone wrong meant the end of the world. It helped him to ease his panic attacks, to stop his hands from shaking, because ‘And Then What?’ usually ended with him dealing with a little embarrassment, worst case scenario. Stammering or messing up a little during a class presentation wasn’t as cataclysmic as he’d thought when he was a kid.

Except that wasn’t the worst case scenario here, now, was it?

Helpless and unable to move, his face burning, his mouth caked in dried blood, Flug knew now there were worse things than a stammer and other kids laughing at him.  


“I-I…! B-because, uh, because, because I’m a villain, too!” he cried out, once he’d scrounged and discovered a little leftover courage.

Black Hat paused. “Hm? You are, are you?”

“Yes! Yes, I’m…! We’re both villains! A-and we villains, we’ve gotta stick together, watch out for each other, right?!”

The demon tapped pensively at his chin. Then, “Fifteen, fourteen…”

Flug couldn’t contain the yelp of sheer terror if he tried. 

Black Hat grinned with twisted delight, showcasing an abominable grin of pointed teeth that was just as terrible as they said. He even chuckled. “All right, all right, bonus five seconds for that one! But that’s all you’re getting, so don’t even _think_ about pissing your pants for more.”

_Gotta stick together?_ The other voice scoffed from beneath his tremors. _Watch out for each other? Way to embarrass yourself! What the hell do you think this is, an after school special?_

The clock ticked, and Flug wanted to scream.

_Shut up, shut up, shut up!! Let me think! Let me concentrate!_

It was awfully difficult, as it had been when The Angel had begun her suicidal descent to the rocks below while her gauges flashed and the lights flickered out. He felt his stomach twisting into a low flip, and figured he had never escaped the diving plane after all.

“U-uh…! I-I, u-uh…!”

By this point, Black Hat was staring idly at The Angel’s still burning remains. He could see the faintest orange tint of the fires dancing in that monocle, and he could only guess at the perverse delight that danced underneath. He was smiling, watching her go up in red crackling tongues. “Seventeen, come on, you’re back down again. Sixteen, fifteen…”

He flirted, however briefly, with the idea of welcoming the end. He could tilt his head up a little, look the one and only Black Hat square in the eye, and say, “You know what? Bite me. Forget your stupid countdown! Whatever you’re gonna do, do it already!” Would it be a show of guts? A glint of spine? Something Black Hat liked to see in up and comers?

_That’ll end about as well as you think, you idiot. Courage and bravado are for_ heroes.

And Flug knew that voice within him was right. Black Hat would likely stare down at him, unimpressed, and then promptly squash him like the little bug he was. 

So Flug lied there, cold and shivering in his own terror and blood loss, quivering down to his bones, and pondered more. He had the answer to this, his logical mind insisted. He did. There was an answer to every conundrum, every riddle, as much as villains like Black Hat enjoyed twisting them into the way of a paradox. And even then, a paradox in itself possessed its own answer; it was a paradox and thus there was no answer, hence the answer. Strange, abstract, maybe a bit of a cheat in the mind of most logicians, but you had to be strange and abstract to work in mad science.

That was something Flug knew very well.

_So what’s the answer?!_ He screamed into himself. _What in god’s name is the answer?!_

“Ten. Nine. Eight.”

_What would appeal to Black Hat? What appeals to a villain, what appeals to a villain more than anything?_

Black Hat tugged a glistening pocket watch out of his coat. Black as hewn onyx, of course, on a black diamond chain. His visible eye watched the last of Flug’s seconds tick by with impassive nonchalance. “Four, three, two…well, this was entertaining for about three seconds, before it became a waste of my–”

“Wait!!” 

A beat.

“What?” Black Hat asked, looking as bored as ever. “I’m still gonna need at least ten more seconds before I decide how it’s done. A gun’s fairly simple, but there’s something so _bestial_ about a good bludgeoning! Takes a good swing of your back, good placement of your legs, see. Guns these days practically aim for the owner, but you _need_ a good technique to bludgeon! Nobody _bludgeons_ anymore. It’s a rotting shame!”

“I-I can…! Look, I’m…!” Flug dug into the last of his reserves and urged himself up. It hurt. It hurt and rang through every hard muscle in his body, and for a dangerous few seconds he saw stars wheeling across his vision. He refused to give. If he went out now, he knew he’d never open his eyes again. “I-I’m an…” Inventor had been the word, but Flug decided this was no time for modesty. Modesty was for heroes, and he could fake not having it just this once. “I’m a mad scientist! An _evil_ scientist! One with…! W-with, uh…!”

“Should I go with a nine iron, do you think?” Black Hat asked conversationally. “Or maybe just a good old fashioned iron mace. If I manage to bring bludgeoning back, I could sell a good line of those for a while. At least for the summer.”

“I’ve got schematics, blue prints, all sorts of inventions t-that paid for that plane!” Flug pressed on, determined. Pissed off now, even. Because Black Hat was now reminding him an awful lot of people he’d once known at the Tech, people who turned their backs on him, paid no mind to anything he had to say, wrote him off as ‘too young’, who gifted him with those I’m So Much Better Than You smiles. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things I-I’m capable of building! You couldn’t imagine! Nothing like it in the whole… world!”

He’d danced briefly with the word _universe,_ before deciding that he didn’t want to milk it. 

To his amazement, Black Hat actually looked at him. He looked at him, and Flug felt the urge to scramble backward, to scream, to take it all back and wish he were dead. It was only for a second, it blipped away as fast as it had come, but he would only have time later on to try to puzzle out what it meant.

Black Hat smiled, exposing a few lengths of teal fang. “The whole _world,_ eh?” He tented his fingers elegantly beneath his chin. “Now that’s quite a pitch you’re throwing.” He bent at the waist ever slightly, that smile slowly stretching into another unnerving grin that Flug once thought to lurk under his bed. “Well? Go on. I’m listening.”

A flood of holy relief took him like the waves coasting towards his feet, just a few yards off. The answer, likely the only answer, and he’d nailed it. He couldn’t remember feeling this exhilarated since the completion of his thesis. It was wrong, it was sick, and it was selling parts of his soul that hadn’t died with The Angel, but it was survival and Flug would leap on it.

Flug coughed. “Well, uh… I do have a few schematics on a flash drive in my pocket that I-I think would really benefit your, um… company, sir!” 

He talked on in this way for a while, spilling all his secrets as if he’d been cut open. Blasters, ray guns, magnetic pulse weapons, every bit of evil arsenal he could think of, Flug played it like an ace. Every card he’d kept up his sleeve, gone.

“Stop,” Black Hat finally said. He was still smiling, though, smiling like a snake. “We’ll take this back to someplace far more proper for your _interview._ ”

The word interview blazed like a stoked coal in his voice. 

“I-interview…?”

“Some place a bit quieter,” Black Hat went on. “Though this _is_ quite the scene! You should watch her burn, ah…” He gave the disfigured young man an impatient look. “Uh… Well, you’ve botched _this_ part of the interview already. What’s your _name,_ you idiot?”

Flug would have likely felt embarrassed, had this even remotely been a normal situation. He drew a deep breath. “Doctor Flug Slys, Mister Black Hat, sir,” he said as respectfully as he could.

“Mm. Flug.” Black Hat shrugged. “Fine, I’ll work with it. But you’re wearing something over all that,” he said, rolling an indicative hand at his face. “I don’t do the whole malformed assistant thing, that went out of style centuries ago. We’ll… get you an evil bag or something. Docked from your pay.”

And as Black Hat outstretched his claws, carving a glowing black portal in midair that would take them back to god knew where, Flug knew this to be one game of ‘And Then What?’ that he had no real answer for. 

Behind them, the Angel burned.

**Author's Note:**

> i promised myself that if i ever wrote background fic like this that i'd try to be NICE to Flug.
> 
> wtf, self. why i do this.


End file.
